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Visa Inc.’s pricing plans for merchant acquirers in the wake of the Durbin Amendment have generated controversy in the acquiring industry, and now they’re attracting scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice, the leading payment card network disclosed on Wednesday. Visa said in a regulatory filing that the DoJ’s Antitrust …
Read More »New Fed Data Give a Glimpse of the Durbin Amendment’s Early Effects
The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday released data about banks’ debit card interchange income now that the Durbin Amendment is in effect. Not surprisingly, the numbers show that interchange for regulated card issuers plunged. The nation’s leading retailer trade group took the occasion to decry the Fed, even though merchants …
Read More »Georgia Breaks Legal Ground With New Charter for Specialty Acquiring Banks
A little-noticed new Georgia law creates a new type of bank dedicated solely to merchant acquiring that could radically transform how the acquiring business works in the U.S. Enacted at the behest of Global Payments Inc., the big Atlanta-based merchant processor, the law enables a non-bank acquirer to own its …
Read More »A Battered Acquiring Industry Seeks New Political Survival Strategies
In the wake of the Durbin Amendment’s debit card price controls taking effect last fall and other new regulations, the payments industry is feeling politically battered and bruised and fearing that more fights with merchants are on the way. “Our era of self-regulation of pricing has ended,” Mary Weaver Bennett, …
Read More »Mitek Fires Back at USAA In a Spat Between Two Remote Deposit Capture Heavyweights
Leading mobile remote deposit capture vendor Mitek Systems Inc. says it has the documentation to disprove allegations of patent-infringement and other claims that USAA, the pioneering financial institution in remote deposit capture, filed against it in a lawsuit last week. The force behind the dispute, according to Mitek president and …
Read More »USAA Sues Mitek Systems in Remote Deposit Capture Patent Dispute
n USAA, the financial institution that pioneered remote deposit capture, is suing Mitek Systems Inc., a leading vendor of software for the mobile version of RDC, claiming that Mitek stole its trade secrets and technology. n San Antonio, Texas-based USAA is seeking a declaratory judgment that it does not infringe …
Read More »AmEx Stops Gift Card Sales in New Jersey As Merchants Battle Zip-Code Law
A controversial New Jersey law that claims unused gift card balances as state property after two years and requires gift card sellers to obtain buyers’ ZIP codes is taking heavy fire. If it survives a repeal effort and court challenges, however, opponents fear gift card issuers will leave the state …
Read More »Online Travel Agencies Big Fraud Targets, But Losses Lower Than All Travel Sites
Online travel agencies are well-known fraud targets, and now new data from CyberSource Corp. suggest that fraudsters make more attempts against them than other sectors of the travel industry. But the data also show that the so-called OTAs’ fraud losses as a percentage of revenue are actually less than elsewhere …
Read More »Processor JetPay Takes Some Flak But Keeps Flying After Direct Air Bankruptcy
n “The bankruptcy court in question agreed with our motion that the escrow account is for the consumer,” Trent Voigt, chief executive of JetPay LLC of Carrollton, Texas, told Digital Transactions News moments after a hearing ended in the case of Southern Sky Air & Tours LLC, doing business as …
Read More »Group Claims Consumers Don’t Expect Retailers to Pass on Durbin Savings
The war of words between the payments industry on the one side and retailers on the other side continued this week when a lobbying group backed by big banks and payment card networks released survey results claiming that only a tiny fraction of consumers believe retailers are passing on their …
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